


Phantoms In The Early Dark

by commoncomitatus



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:10:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-episode tag for "Don't Hate The Player". Ghosts and clouds and nameless things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantoms In The Early Dark

She wakes up sweating.

The air is thick. It’s hot and heavy, bearing down on her like a solid weight, impossible to breathe through. It’s not just oppressive, either; it’s actually suffocating. It’s everywhere, smothering and strangling, beyond unbearable, and it pulses through her in waves.

For a moment or two, she’s sure that she’s going to be sick. The sharp claws of fear are tearing into her guts, leaving open wounds for the overheated air to wriggle its way into. It’s even hotter there; her whole body is feverish and saturated, and the heat churns violently within her, mingling with the revenant terror until she can scarcely keep either one of them inside, and the sensation is so urgent and so visceral that it forces her to sit up.

She lurches, sways, sickness catching in her throat for a beat or two, and then she’s out of bed, stumbling and gasping at the sudden softness of the carpet beneath her feet. She’s not sure what she was expecting to feel when she hit the floor, but the shock of it is enough to make her realise that it wasn’t that. The carpet is cool, a sharp contrast to the hot air, and it’s welcome.

The cool comfort, so much sweeter than anything she deserves, brings a sharp sting to her eyes; she can’t quite understand why, but the sudden sorrow rolls over the nausea, quelling it in gradual increments until she feels brave enough to pull her hand away from her mouth.

What falls from her lips instead is a curse; it’s hoarse and rough, barely beyond a whisper, and is lost almost before it manifests to the rustling curtains, the weak mewling sound absorbed by the shadowed posters on the wall.

In spite of the heat, she’s shaking. Scattered remnants of pain and fear flicker like sensory feedback across the corners of her mind, sharp-edged fragments left over from a dream she’s had too often, imaginary but so vivid that they leave her trembling down to her bones.

It’s not new. It’s no different to the hundreds of other dreams she’s had – the same thing, over and over and over – and it’s certainly nothing special. She’s been here before, more times than she can count, tossed about by her emotions, seasick and helpless, and it never changes. It’s always the same, every single time, taking her by the throat and squeezing until she can’t breathe.

The thing is, though, it’s not just a dream this time.

This time, it’s not just a static-touched black-and-white horror movie, a half-remembered ghost of something that could have been but never was. It’s not just the phantasmal imaginings of things that might have happened, safe in their intangibility even as they carves up her insides.

This time, it’s not a ‘what if’. This time, it’s a memory. It’s solid and physical, and that means she’s not just seeing it. This time, she can feel it too.

Her chest hurts. There’s a tightness across her lungs, pressure and power by turns, and it makes it difficult to breathe. She remembers what it means – remembers it in intimate and infinite detail, the suffocating strength, straps and buckles holding her down – and the air turns to poison in her mouth, sharp as electricity and thick as medicine.

She staggers where she stands. Chokes on a breath. Drives herself forward by sheer force of will, and runs.

Even in the dark, the bathroom gleams. Spotlessly clean, everything pure and perfect, sparkling white tiles lined up in maddening symmetry, and it makes her want to scream.

White tiles, white floor, white walls, white ceiling.

White coats.

Voices in her ear, soft and low and so full of insincere kindness, so sure that they’re helping even as they bend and twist her mind, pulling her apart from the inside. It’s the kind of abuse that doesn’t leave a mark, sterilised by science and washed clean by sordid promises that it’s “for her own good”.

She tugs on her hair, relishing the pain that sparks at its roots, violence she can see and feel and control. For a few moments, the unfettered roughness brings a crude kind of comfort. Then, surprising herself, she tears her hands free, twisting, and spins a complete one-eighty. Lurches forward to switch on the shower, and watches as the steam cuts through the invisible heat, filling the room until the spotless white tiles are completely obscured.

Out of sight, out of mind.

The walls are out of sight, and she’s out of her mind. It’s not exactly the most even balance in the world, but it makes her laugh. The sound is wild, sharp and pitchy, and it echoes until the pressure on her lungs breaks it into a sob.

She’s on her knees, then, and the hot wet air is shot through with the sharp crack of solid floor connecting with her joints. The pain of the impact is lost to the tumult in her head, though, the screams that she can’t (or won’t) let herself voice, and the fear rears up again like a wild creature, howling and dangerous in the haze of heat and steam and darkness.

Her hands are in her hair again, finding purchase in the tangled tresses as she presses the heels of her palms against her temples, trying to keep the memory inside. The pressure on her chest is mirrored in her head now, whispers and murmurs of voices she’s tried so hard to forget worming their way into her brain until she can’t process anything else, can’t think or see or breathe through them, until she has no choice but to hear what they’re saying to her.

She wants to cry, but the tears won’t come. Maybe there’s too much moisture in the air already, from the heat and shower both, everything too saturated to make room for tears as well... or else maybe she still can’t let go of the part of her that aches to be numbed against all of this. Whatever the reason, she can’t cry. All she can do is hunch there with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth in the steam-soaked silence, until she recovers enough of herself to stand.

Once she’s upright, she braces herself against the sink. She leans forward, squinting blurrily, and tries to make out her face in the mirror through the heavy shimmer of condensation. There’s too much of it, though, and if there’s anything underneath, she can’t see it. The void behind the glass is almost more frightening than the damning murmurs in her head, and the lack of anything tangible only heightens the sick horror from the phantasmal voices and sensations all around her.

She can’t see herself. The walls are obscured, but so too is her face, and she can’t make out her own identity at all any more.

It’s the fear that drives her from the bathroom. She fumbles to switch off the shower, but she’s as blind as she is useless now, and she can’t find anything through the steam. So, because she’s afraid, because her body is screaming for escape, she leaves it. Just leaves it like it is, the water pulsing and streaming in the empty room, loud and hot enough to wake the dead. Leaves everything exactly as it is, just turns around and leaves it all.

She turns, and runs for her life.

She stumbles on the stairs. Her foot catches, unaccustomed to navigating half-blind in the dark and with no shoes, and she trips and falls down the last two or three steps.

Her skull cracks sharply against the solid wooden floor, impossibly loud, and hot white light flares and flashes behind her eyes. Reflexive, angry, she curls in on herself, clutching at her head all over again, and it’s only the shock of the moment that keeps her from rending the air with curses and screams.

The world tilts as she braces herself on her arms. It’s dizzying, unimaginably colourful, and she knows that it’s real – that this is her home – but her vision is blurring and her head is throbbing with pain and fear, confusing and confounding her, and if there’s any sense to be found in this fractured place, this soft-focus world, she’s too far gone to find it.

She tries to stand, but the air drives her back down, weighting the imaginary straps tight across her chest. And so, instead, she stays where she is, on her hands and knees at the bottom of the stairs, unable to see or hear or think, unable to cry or call for help, hunched forward and held down by horror-movie memories of leather straps and crackling electricity, things that never happened except in her head, until the day they did.

It’s not like she doesn’t have enough to be afraid of. It’s not like the nightmares don’t scare her enough. It’s not like she ever asked for any of it.

None of this is fair.

It isn’t fair that she’s lost the one small comfort she had, the sanctuary of knowing that dreams are nothing more than exaggerated manifestations of her worst imaginings. It isn’t fair that she can _remember_ it now – not just the fear, but the reality of it, the solid, physical, genuine sensation. It’s not fair that she can feel it all again now, real because it actually happened this time, the chafing of leather straps across her chest, her hands and feet, binding all the parts of her she uses to fight, and the ice-resonant ring of sparking metal pressed to her temples.

Nightmares are one thing. Fears are another. Nightmares shaped by fears are something else entirely... and when the fears those nightmares feed on are forged in themselves from memories, the clouded ghosts of real life twisted into Hitchcock horrors and video-game monsters, it’s only the exaggeration – the fantasy of the dreamscape – that keeps them from being truly real. The knowledge that the things she dreams about _cannot happen_ was the only thing that would keep her breathing when she woke from them.

But now that’s gone too...

...because it did happen.

What she remembers now isn’t a dream. She’s not simply haunted by spectral visions, conjured ghosts from her own twisted mind, subconscious night terrors holding her by the throat and force-feeding her with her own sick traumas, a distorted reflection of her broken self in the the serrated knife-edge of _‘what if’_. It’s not the nightmare that she can’t shake this time, but the reality of it... and remembering the nightmare is horrifying enough most of the time, but remembering the reality now too makes it unimaginable. It’s the experience that has her by the throat this time, the handful of minutes that lasted a thousand lifetimes, leather straps and electric shocks, and it doesn’t matter that a virtual-reality video game is no more real than a manifested nightmare because she felt it. She felt it all, solid and physical, and it was real and it was true and it _happened_.

She wants to forget. She wants to close her eyes and her mind, shut herself down, forget everything.

Right now, she’d even let herself forget the good things too. She would willingly lose the best things she’s ever known, the things that have made her think that her whole worthless life might actually have some kind of value after all. In this moment, she would forget all of that in a heartbeat, without even so much as a thought or a moment to mourn it. She’d cast it all aside like it was nothing, if it only meant she could forget this too.

She doesn’t care about what she’d lose, how high the price would be, how much she’d regret not having known. She doesn’t care what’s good in her life, what’s so wonderful and beautiful, how perfect this place is that has found her and taken her in. She can’t see any of the things that are so kind to her and good for her, this tilted soft-focus world of endless wonder that is so unspeakably precious. Right now, she can’t see anything at all. She can’t even breathe through the fear, and it has her too far tight to let anything else in. It’s too strong, its grip too forceful, its power to great, and she cannot fight it.

She just wants to forget.

Time blurs; it swirls around her like curtains framing an open window in a storm, ghostly and untouchable, and she has no way of measuring how much of it there is, how long she stays like that, how long her mind holds her in its twisted-up thrall. There’s no way of knowing anything at all, of thinking or seeing or feeling, until the heavy warmth of something that isn’t made of leather or metal drops down onto her shoulder, a voice she knows shattering the feather-light whispers holding her mind captive.

“Claud?”

She tries to raise her head, but it’s too heavy. Tries to speak, but her mouth is full of medicine-thick electricity.

“Claud!”

Her fingers claw at the floor, scrabbling for something to grip, but there’s not enough there to find purchase and she doesn’t have the strength to make use of what little there is.

But, of course, she doesn’t have to do anything. Because she’s here, in this tilted and perfect world where – for reasons she can’t understand at all just at the moment – other people take it upon themselves to do for her all the things she can’t do for herself, and suddenly her field of vision, even as blurred and hazy as it is right now, is filled completely with the subtle shades of a face that she recognises, warm pale eyes and familiar features drawn together in breathless worry.

“Claud, can you hear me?”

She nods. She can at least manage that much.

Relief floods those worry-tight features. “Good.”

She chokes down a breath. Swallows. “Myka?”

“I’m here.” The words are spoken without hesitation, strong and steady, and they give away none of the concern that is so obvious on her face. “I’m right here, Claud. Are you okay?”

She musters another weak nod. Talking comes a little more easily now, though the struggle is still enough to cripple her. “Just tripped on the stairs. It’s dark.”

“Okay.” Myka doesn’t hesitate, and she doesn’t challenge either. She just guides her upright, supporting her when it becomes obvious that she can’t support herself, and helps her over to the couch. “Sit down.”

It’s a pointless instruction, but she finds herself eased down onto the cushions before she has a chance to try and take action for herself. “I’m okay, Myka.”

“Claud...”

Myka’s hands are in her hair now, but they’re not tugging at it like she did with her own. They’re gentle and kind, pushing it back with unbearable softness and framing her face.

“Myka...”

A sigh shudders between them, and it must have come from Myka because there’s not nearly enough oxygen in her own lungs to breathe in that deep. “Bad dreams?”

She tries to shake her head, to deny everything, but it takes more effort than she’s capable of giving. And it wouldn’t make any difference, anyway, even if she could pretend that none of these things exist, because Myka was there. She was right there, like Pete was, like Fargo was, and she saw it with her own eyes. It’s frightening to think how much she must have seen – and she probably heard it all, too, the screaming and the unending sobs that followed, heard and saw and bore witness to everything, all of it, every second and every word and every trauma-rattled breath – and there is nothing that either one of them can do to erase that knowledge.

So she doesn’t try. She can’t, and even if she could, she wouldn’t.

“Yeah,” she admits instead, and hates the honesty. “Bad dreams.”

She can’t even fight the truth any more; the black-and-white phantasms have taken even that meagre victory away from her now too. She can’t elucidate, can’t bring herself to even nod again, but the mumbled affirmation is enough, and she can feel Myka’s hands starting to shake just a little as they touch her face.

“I see,” Myka murmurs, and it’s obvious that she’s uncomfortable, out of her element; this clearly isn’t what she came down here for, and it cuts deep to know that she is an unwanted distraction. “Do you... do you need anything? Want anything? Can I help at all?”

She wants to say something snarky, maybe even something obnoxious. It would be the reassurance they both need, making it clear that she really is okay, only the words don’t come. Because she isn’t okay, because she is so many miles away from ‘okay’ that she doesn’t even have enough of herself in one piece to try and pretend that she is. And that hurts worst of all, that she can’t even do what she always does, that she can’t even defend herself with calloused dishonesty. She doesn’t even have that, the last stand, the final weapon of the arrogant and the young. She can’t even say _“I’m fine”_ and not mean it.

Apparently she hesitates too long without answering, waging war against herself for too much time, because suddenly Myka isn’t there any more, seemingly choosing to take the law into her own hands, and she’s left alone on the couch, swaying and sweating, feeling sick and small.

It’s just a moment, maybe even less than that, and then Myka’s back, pressing a cool glass into her hands. She can’t see its contents in the dark, but she can see the moon outside reflected in its surface and suspects that it’s probably water. At the sight of it, her dulled senses come to life, and she realises that she is desperately thirsty.

She drinks like she’s never tasted the stuff before, and the glass is empty in a heartbeat, drained drier than a bone in less than the time it took to fetch it. And then Myka’s hand is at her back, rubbing lightly in small half-circles because her chest has started to spasm in humiliating little hiccups.

“This is why we drink slowly,” Myka chastises, voice low; there’s amusement in her tone, but it’s guarded and uneasy and not like Myka at all.

She tries to glare, but her face won’t heed her instructions. Instead, she just swallows again, and holds her breath until the hiccups subside. Then, almost too soft to be heard, she hears herself whisper, “How much did you see?”

Myka sighs, and her hand stills. “Claud...”

“How much?” she asks again, and the need to know strengthens the part of her that is still struggling to form the words at all. “In the game. When we... when you came to save us. How much did you see?”

Myka’s eyes flutter closed, like she’s trying really hard not to remember anything at all, and that’s probably enough of an answer in itself, but she so desperately needs to hear the words spoken out loud, to know beyond all doubt that Myka _knows_.

“Enough.” Myka sighs again, and then her hand is gone completely from her back. “I saw enough.”

Her chest spasms again, but it’s not a hiccup this time. She’s still not sure she’s got it in her to cry, but the tears are definitely closer to the surface now than they were before. She really, really doesn’t want to cry in front of Myka, but her whole body is screaming for the relief that the tears would bring; the sharp sting behind her eyes is almost unbearable through the tears that she still can’t shed, and it would almost be worth the shame of knowing that Myka will see it if it would just ease the pressure.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

There is genuine surprise on Myka’s face now, and confusion too. “Sorry for what?” she asks, like she doesn’t know. Then, when she doesn’t respond quickly enough, “Claud! Sorry for _what_?”

The question is ridiculous. How does Myka expect her to put everything she regrets into words? How can she expect her to explain it when she can barely say anything at all? There’s too much, too many reasons, too much shame and hurt and fear, too many things she is so very sorry for, but she can’t speak and the words are too dangerous, too sharp for her to take them by the blade without cutting her hands open.

So she just whispers “... _everything_...” in a shuddering half-breath, and realises as the words shake the air that it’s not really so far away from the truth.

“Claud.” Myka sounds almost like she wants to cry as well, like this is hurting her just as deeply, and that realisation makes everything feel even worse than it already does. “Claud, listen to me. You don’t have anything to be sorry for. Okay? You didn’t do anything.”

Maybe that’s true. And maybe it isn’t. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because she can’t see past it. She can’t think past the memory of her own screams, the tumult of her traumas bouncing off the pixelated walls like light refracted through a prism, scattering in all directions, taking in Myka and everyone else in the room – Pete, and Fargo too – until they have no choice but to see it and hear it and feel it too, until they have no choice but to experience it all right along with her, and that...

...that _is_ something to be sorry for.

“You shouldn’t have to...” she starts, but apparently what little capacity for words she’d managed to summon before has been all used up by now, and her voice cracks and breaks into nothing once more.

She hunches forward again, cradling her head and pressing down until she’s curled completely in on herself, chin tucked neatly beneath her chest and knees drawn up tight. She can sense the unease in Myka, unsure whether to touch her or not, not quite able to figure out whether it would do more good or harm, and feels the distance between them turning the air cold and bitter.

“Claud...”

The experience, such as it was, wasn’t real. She knows that, and she wants to make sure Myka gets that she knows it. She needs to reassure herself, to really be sure that Myka doesn’t think she’s lost it as completely – broken as irreparably – as she feels like she is. It’s bad enough that she feels it inside herself; Myka isn’t allowed to think it too. She wants Myka to believe that she’s going to be all right, that this is just a weak moment, a fleeting revenant of a bad dream in the wake of a terrible day. She wants Myka to think that she’s not really like this.

She wants to speak the words out loud, to shape them into truth by hearing them, tasting them, feeling them on the air, seeing them reflected in Myka’s eyes. She wants so desperately to make them real by saying them. But she can’t. She can’t say anything at all.

Myka, for her part, is trying so hard to be helpful.

“I can’t imagine what you must be going through,” she says, like that isn’t the worst possible thing anyone could say right now. “But it’s okay, Claud. It’s okay to be scared, and it’s definitely, definitely okay to have bad dreams about this kind of stuff.” There’s a smile in her voice, but it’s strained. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to stop dreaming about Yellowstone?”

The name sends a chill through the air, and her body gives an involuntary twitch; still pressing down on the back of her head, her hands begin to shake all over again.

“Dammit.” Apparently realising that that really didn’t help, that it actually did exactly the opposite of help, Myka scoots backwards a little. “I’m sorry, Claud,” she says, and the apology sounds strange coming from her. Stranger still that Myka herself isn’t the one who feels the pain of hearing that name this time. “I didn’t mean to bring that up. I didn’t...”

She trails off then, and the air shifts and pulses like something is happening, only the heat is too potent and too heavy to fight through and look up. Not that it matters anyway, because less than a moment later she feels Myka’s hand hovering over her shoulder, tangible even through the couple inches of air still between them, and it’s not comforting at all, but at least it tells her what’s going on.

“What can I do?” Myka’s breathing is a little uneven now, like she’s trying not to panic. “How can I help?”

She whimpers. The world is all broken apart, and Myka’s presence should be enough to glue little pieces of it back together again – some, if not all – but it’s not. It’s not, because, as much as she cares about Myka – about Pete, about Artie, about Leena, about Steve, about everyone in this place – they’re still _people_. And the more they try to help her, the more she hears those other voices, just as soft and low and honest, just as _human_ and every bit as earnest in their offers of ‘help’, all those promises that it’s “for her own good”, pretty embroidered blankets made to cover over the hurt underneath... and she can’t tell one kind of person – one breed of _help_ – from another.

Because that’s their power. For all the terrible things that happen in her dreams, they’re always done so kindly, always executed with so much honest compassionate. Because they want to help her too. Like, they really do believe that what they’re doing is helping her, that they’re doing the right thing, that it really is good for her. They’re not trying to hurt her, they’re trying to _help_ , and hearing Myka use that same gentle tone of voice now – shivery with sincerity even as she offers exactly the same thing – only makes it even worse. It just reminds her that soft-spoken words in sweet voices don’t always bring good things, that meaning well doesn’t always negate the infliction of pain, that the best intentions in the world can have the most sordid outcomes.

It upsets her a great deal to think of Myka like that. Myka is her friend. She knows that... but the ring of her voice is so sickeningly familiar. _“Let me help you,”_ it’s saying. But she is so very frightened of being helped.

And maybe Myka can sense that, because suddenly she’s sighing, and the air is shifting again as they both shake their heads, and then all she can hear is “okay...”, over and over and over again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, though she knows it won’t do either of them any good.

“Okay,” Myka says again, like she knows there’s no point in arguing against the apology this time, even if she still can’t understand it. “Just stay here for a minute or two, okay? I’ll be right back.”

And then she’s alone again, gasping through the unfathomable heat, the air practically set alight by the flint of her fear. It’s a very confusing place to be – too frightened to be alone and yet knowing that other people will only make it worse. She aches to draw comfort from Myka’s presence, to let her _help_ , but the thought is as frightening as the revenant phantoms of electricity and leather straps. She needs to fight this off herself; her sanity (if not her life, this time) depends upon it. She can’t break free of a fear of help by being helped. That’s just not possible. And so she has to endure this on her own.

But she is afraid of solitude, too, afraid of the thoughts that tear through her, the damage to her mind. It’s a breed of masochism, the way she tortures herself, the way she can’t let go of the nightmares now that she knows how they feel in a world that’s almost real. A horror-movie monster faced down in virtual reality, her nerves reeling from how real it felt, cables and wires and an artefact all come together to conjure a full-sensory experience.

Well, it worked. Virtual reality made actual reality, dreams made real, and she could feel it all.

In his defence, though, she’s pretty sure that this isn’t what Fargo had in mind when he started.

She digs her nails into the back of her neck, relishes the bite of pain just as she did in the bathroom. Tiny little pinpricks that don’t even break the skin, but they ground her in what is real, a pain that is tangible, and she tries to block out everything else, to silence the whispers in her head and just think about the way that it hurts.

Broken right down, pain is an interesting sensation, and she’s always taken a strange kind of comfort in thinking about it. It takes up too many resources in the brain, she’s learned, and the harder she focuses on it, the less room her mind has to think about anything else. It’s too busy trying to pick apart the physical sensation, struggling to translate the scream of synapses and nerves into something it can understand. She can’t think and feel at the same time, and when she tries to bend her mind into thinking about what her body is feeling, it negates both – thought and sensation – until nothing remains but the effort and the sweat beading on her brow.

It works well, if only for a short while, but it buys her enough time to make it through the couple of minutes before Myka is back.

“Hey.”

She feels her shoulders go tight. She wants to open her mouth, to at least try to counter the greeting, but even if she could speak, her mind is at war with itself over what it wants to say. Half of her wants to beg Myka to stay, the other half wants to beg her to leave, and the whole of her knows that neither of these options would make anything better. She wants everything and nothing, but if her life depended on it, she couldn’t say which of the two is the one that she needs.

“Claud, listen...” Myka is filling in the gaps for her, speaking so that she doesn’t have to, and she wants to be annoyed, but all she can feel is grateful. “I kind of... I kind of get the that feeling you don’t really want me around right now.” It’s not an accusation, and she doesn’t sound upset about it, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling awful about it; Myka senses that, though, and presses on. “And that’s okay. When I have bad dreams, I don’t want people breathing down my neck either.”

“I don’t know what I want,” she whispers, the words barely even making their way out of her throat at all, much less in a format that could be described as ‘speech’.

“And that’s okay too,” Myka insists. “You don’t have to. But Claud... I don’t want to leave you alone. So, uh...” She breathes in. “I brought Pete. And I think you should let him stay with you and take care of you.”

She raises her head at that; she doesn’t want to be helped by Pete any more than she wants to be helped by Myka, and she feels strongly enough about it that she actually forgets about the part where she still can’t form a cohesive sentence, because her mouth is already open to shape a flabbergasted complaint when she catches sight of what Myka means and stops in her tracks.

Because it’s not _Pete_.

At least, it’s not the one she was expecting. It’s the _other_ Pete. It’s the annoying little fleabag that Myka named after the real Pete, and its sitting happily on Myka’s shoulder and staring at her like it’s trying to figure out what’s so important that meant it had to be woken up.

“Uh, Myka?”

“I’m serious,” Myka tells her, and the smile on her face is warm and compassionate; it makes her feel sick to look at it, so she looks at the ferret instead. “He’s really good with this stuff.”

“He’s a rat.”

Myka scowls. “He’s not a _rat_ , Claud. He’s a _ferret_. And he’s really clever.”

“I don’t...” She closes her eyes. “I... I don’t really feel like babysitting your ferret, Myka...”

“He doesn’t need a babysitter!” Myka actually sounds a little offended by that, and it would be amusing, except there’s nothing about tonight that is funny at all. “He’s just company, Claud. He’s someone you can—” She falters, like she can’t quite shape the phrase without feeling awkward and clumsy. “—‘hang out’ with, and not feel strange about it. He’s not going to judge you, or try and help you, or ask if you’re feeling okay every five seconds. He’s not going to say anything at all. He’ll just hang around and not talk. Just like you.”

She makes a sad noise from somewhere in her throat, but can’t argue the point. She really is kind of failing at talking tonight, and it’s more than she can do to pretend that that isn’t the case.

But Myka isn’t done yet, anyway. “C’mon, Claud. Give him a chance. He doesn’t want to invade your thoughts or your personal space. He just wants to sit there and spend some time with his Auntie Claudia.” She smiles. “And he gives pretty great hugs.”

“I don’t want a hug.”

“I know,” Myka says, “but you might later, when you’re feeling better.”

“What if I don’t?” she asks, and it’s only when the thought is out that she realises just how much it scares her.

Myka shrugs, unfazed. “He’s a ferret. He’s not going to be offended.”

She sighs. “Myka...”

“Claud.” Without asking permission, Myka hands the little fleabag over, and she has no choice but to take him or else let him wriggle free and escape. “He’s really, really good.”

She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t have enough energy left in her to try.

“Good girl,” Myka says softly.

It’s meant as praise, she knows, but the phrase resonates with some mnemonic corner of the fear inside her head and makes her breath catch in her throat. For a moment or two, she can’t breathe at all, and she’s less than a heartbeat away from losing herself completely to the nightmare memories, the resurfacing fear, the rising sickness and the acid terror... when, as if on cue, the ferret rears up. It makes an indignant noise – and she’d swear it shoots a pointed glare at Myka, too – then scurries a clumsy path up her arm. It settles across her shoulders like a scarf, tiny little claws digging in just deep enough to ground her in the physicality of it, and chitters squeakily in her ears, so loud that its noises block out the trauma.

“Fine,” she grumbles. Or tries to grumble; mostly, it just comes out like a broken whimper. “I’ll look after it.”

“Him,” Myka corrects.

“ _Him_. Whatever. Just...” She can feel herself starting to tremble again, right down to her bones, and it’s pretty obvious that Myka can see it. “Myka, please. Just...”

_...leave_ , she wants to say, but can’t.

“Okay.” Graceful and sombre, Myka rises.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers again. “I’m sorry.”

Myka looks at her, and there’s real pity in her eyes, like she can see something but won’t say what it is. It’s unnerving, and she drops her gaze so she doesn’t have to look at it. It hurts too much to see someone else looking at her like that; it’s too close to an offer of help, the expression so like someone who so desperately wants to say they know what’s _good for her_... and she can’t hear that. It’s bad enough that Myka is doing this. Anything more, anything closer to the nerve, and it will sever.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Myka says, then cocks her head. “His cage is by the stairs, if you want to try and go back to sleep.”

She doesn’t say that that’s not going to happen, and she definitely doesn’t say that, even if she were exhausted to the point of collapse, she wouldn’t face the possibility of seeing those visions again tonight. Sleep is not an option.

They’re just dreams, stupid and harmless. She knows that – even the memories themselves are phantasmal, kind of, at least so much as they’re video-game distant, pixelated and removed from reality – but that doesn’t make them any less terrifying, even just to think about. She will not go back to sleep, whatever happens. Not tonight. Maybe not even tomorrow, either. Not until she’s too exhausted to fight at all.

“Myka...” she manages.

“Don’t,” Myka snaps, and it’s an order. “Do _not_ tell me how sorry you are.”

So she doesn’t. But she still thinks it, and, as Myka climbs the stairs, leaving her and the ferret alone with each other, the pounding of her heart beats in time with the words, over and over and over, until every breath is an apology she’s not allowed to voice.

The ferret nuzzles her face. It’s making tiny noises, burbling little water-fountain sounds, like it’s trying to purr or something. And it’s not doing that because it wants to comfort her, she can tell, or because it thinks the sounds are “good for her”, or because it thinks she needs its _help_. It’s purring because it’s happy, and it’s nuzzling her because she’s warm. Probably a little too warm, actually, still overheated and feverish, but that’s not the point. The ferret isn’t sitting on her shoulder because she needs it to; it’s sitting there because that’s where it wants to be, because her shoulder is a comfortable resting place. The fact that its softness is soothing, and that its stupid purring noises are kind of comforting... from the little beast’s perspective, all of that is just a happy accident. In fact, as far as Pete The Fleabag is concerned, anything that she feels at all – good or bad or otherwise – is just a coincidental side-effect of its own comfort.

He’s not here for her. He’s here for himself. She’s just the nearest available human to snuggle up to.

The relief is palpable. She’s not a patient here, or an inmate, or a damaged thing. She’s not a scared girl suffering from bad dreams, or a weakened soul who has been through terrible things, or a troubled youth in need of guidance and help. The ferret doesn’t see a victim in her, or someone who has endured horrible traumas. Of course he doesn’t; he wasn’t there. He didn’t hear her screams, so why would he assume they ever existed? All he knows is that her shoulders are comfortable, that her face is warm, and that she makes a good pillow.

And maybe Myka knows a little more about this kind of stuff than she pretends to, because this is exactly what she needs, a companion who won’t look at her...

...more, a companion who won’t _see_ her.

Tentatively, she pats the little creature’s head. It squeaks, then sort-of purrs a little more, and finally settles, kneading at her shoulders like a kitten on a comforter.

“You’re annoying,” she tells it, and she’s positive that its noises take on a sudden air of smug satisfaction. 

She leans back, careful not to crush it – if only because she knows Myka would never forgive her – and lets her eyes slide shut. She can hear the ferret’s meaningless chatter at the edge of her awareness, and it keeps her grounded in where she is, where she really and actually is, this world that is her home. It makes it less frightening when her thoughts wander, when her chest gets tight under the pressure of thick straps, when the air gets hot and unbearable, when her temples throb in time with the pulse of cold steel and arcing electricity.

She wants to tug at her hair again, to inflict that fractured half-pain that lets her feel almost like she’s in control of what she’s going through. But she can’t reach because the ferret is in the way.

And it’s like the little fleabag knows what she wants to do, like it can tell by the way that she’s twitching exactly what she’s aiming for, because then its claws are digging in and she can feel its tiny teeth nibbling at her. It’s not the kind of compulsive pain she wants, the spasmodic twitches of self-inflicted roughness – not nearly brutal enough to be called ‘violence’ – but it’s enough of a surrogate that she finds she doesn’t really miss the pull of her own hands.

So, okay. Maybe the ferret can stay for a little while.

It doesn’t make the fear less, doesn’t stop her remembering what she remembers, or feeling the scream of terrified trauma surge through her again and again every time she lets her mind take control. It doesn’t change what she’s feeling, why she’s here, the way her dreams aren’t just dreams any more. There’s no part of who she is or what she’s going through that can be changed by the presence of a noisy, stupid obnoxious little rodent thing... but it helps her to sand over the jagged gasps that she can’t quite choke down, smoothing them over until the air is almost breathable again, and it gives her something to focus on in the scattered moments when the kind and gentle voices in her head – the ones that always dust torture with sweetness – have to pause for breath themselves.

It keeps her in the present, at least as much as she’s capable of remembering what that word even means, and that’s enough to keep her sane.

It’s enough to remind her – right here and right now, in this moment – of who she is.

It won’t change anything. She knows that. It won’t stop the nightmares from taking her, or change the fact that she now has to file some of them under ‘ _(sort of) real-life experiences actually lived through_ ’ instead of ‘ _horror-movie phantasms_ ’ or, far worse, ‘ _what if'_. It doesn’t make her feel safe or secure, or any less scared at all... but it does give her something to cling to, an anchor to tether her to the world while she rides out the tempest.

It lets her know that she’ll live to see the other side of this, that she will survive the night.

And, okay. So maybe she won’t come out of this any braver or stronger or better than she was before. Maybe she’ll come out of it exactly the same, the same stupid scared nut-job who can’t tell what’s real from what’s inside her head. Hell, maybe she’ll even come out of it worse – less brave, less strong, less of everything. Maybe she’ll come out of it broken and damaged, split apart and cut open by a crack in her mind that will only widen and widen until it shatters and takes her with it. The odds are stacked against her, there’s no denying that, and she has no way of knowing how bad the worst of it will be.

Fact is, she’s not going to come out of this in one piece.

But at least she’ll come of it alive.


End file.
